Youtube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine in the world (the largest is Google … which owns Youtube. Go figure).

Guess what? Youtube understands searching and keywords. And they give us video creators plenty of opportunities to take advantage of that knowledge.

There are three areas surrounding a Youtube video that are full of keywords – the title of the video, the video description, and Youtube tags, which appear underneath the description box in Youtube.

Here are some suggestions for getting the most out of those “keyword heavy” areas:

Video Title – put important keywords in the title. Use a solid descriptive title for the video rather than a cutesy vague name, and put the most important keywords in the beginning of the title. If possible, make the title clear and compelling (so people will click and watch). Need to include branding in the title? Put that at the end of the title.

Video Description – Put a clickable link to your site up-front. After that, write a good description of the video. Include relevant keywords, links, etc. Here’s what ReelSEO says to do in the video description: “The first thing to appear should always be your URL, followed by a hard return. This is because it will make a clickable link to your web site. Next, put as many words as possible in your description. More often than not, a youtube marketer will only put one or two sentences. But a longer description (for example 500 to 1000 words) is better. Remember that spidering robots index text. So give them a little food to work with.”

Tags – Tags are used as search terms in Youtube, and you want to use as many of these as possible. Use both common and specific keywords. Include variations on words, and use quotes for phrases. If you can, use 12 or more keywords. If you’re creating video for your organization, create a set of standard tags that all your videos will use (ie, library, topeka, etc).

So – start peppering your youtube videos with relevant tags and keywords, and let’s see if your video views increase!

Notes from David Weinberger’s session titled “Miscellaneous Knowledge” (he retitled it “The Smell of Knowledge” – David is a pretty funny guy…)

We’re in an age of abundance – both good and bad stuff (ie., spam)

We’re used to our notion of “it’s hard to find good stuff” – not so hard anymore

We assume this – some knowledge is simple – it’s true for everyone – ex = some apples are red

Other assumptions:
– knowledge and truth is scarce (so institutions grow around this scarce knowledge)
– knowledge is orderly (everything fits neatly into categories, even one category)

This is not the case – ie., “is pluto a planet?” – it’s not orderly

we cluster things depending on what we’re doing at the moment – it’s not orderly – it’s personal and changing

Three orders:
first order – come up with a single way of ordering – stuff goes in a single place
second order – separate metadata from the thing – makes physical object easier to find
third order – content and metadata becomes digital – no need to put stuff in one place anymore

2. messiness is a virtue – all this stuff can link to each other, you can link it in many different ways to add value to it

3. metadata and data are merging – ie., you can search subject heading for Moby Dick – you can also search for “call me ishmael” – brings back same thing. You just used data as metadata… “everything is a lever”

Content is connection – Books are built as dead-ends – it’s difficult to make connections from one book to another. Digitally, this gets much simpler through links

4. unowned order – or personally-owned order. I can arrange it however I personallywant to – I don’t have to depend on others anymore

Cataloging – worked great in print. On the web, it simply doesn’t scale

Example – LOC added 3000 photos to flickr with the metadata they had – they allowed users to add tags, and they did. SOme photos ran out of tags – flickr allows 75 tags. So people left their tags in the comments.

LOC doesn’t have the time, staff, or expertise to tag these 3000 photos the way they’re being tagged – they needed user-generated tags

Nice slide – David added Wikipedia’s “the neutrality of this article is disputed” phrase to a screenshot of the New York TImes… then asked – “why don’t we see this?”

A discussion list is smarter than an individual poster to the list. Knowledge exists through conversation, and is social.

Knowledge is becoming linked.

a blogger that links to other places tells people to “go away.” The hope is that readers will find that valuable enough to come back to you.

A newspaper is more narcissistic than a blogger – they point back to themselves most of the time – the rest are ads. Bloggers point away from themselves.